Super Thursday: with 500 new books out today, what should you read?

New books from Mary Berry, Dan Brown and Dawn French are out, as part of the mass launch that marks the start of the Christmas season – and there’s another 250 on the way. Here are 10 titles in the running for No 1

More than 500 glossy new hardbacks are set to arrive on the shelves of the UK’s booksellers on Thursday, as books by names ranging from Alan Hollinghurst to Mary Berry prepare to do battle for the Christmas No 1 slot.

This year, 505 new books are being published on Super Thursday, the day marked out as the start of the annual race for Christmas bestsellers. As usual, memoirs feature prominently, with books by actor David Jason, comedian Sarah Millican, and Virgin tycoon Richard Branson. There is also a diary from Dawn French; Niall Ferguson’s The Square and the Tower, a look at social networks of the past; and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s take on the Obama era, We Were Eight Years in Power.

While celebrities including Nadiya Hussain and Cara Delevingne are jumping into the lucrative children’s book market, there are new literary novels from two Man Booker prize winners – Hollinghurst (The Sparsholt Affair) and John Banville (Mrs Osmond) – but the biggest fiction seller is likely to be Philip Pullman’s long-awaited La Belle Sauvage, out a little later, on 19 October, along with 259 other new hardbacks.

Despite the deluge of new titles, the Christmas No 1 may already be out. Dan Brown’s new novel Origin was released on 3 October, and Waterstones fiction buyer Chris White said that “judging by our first day’s sales, a new Brown novel still has the potential to get people flocking into bookshops. Bestsellerdom is assured.”

Ten biggest books for Christmas 2017

Jamie Oliver’s 5 Ingredients – Quick & Easy FoodAlready published, and indeed currently in its sixth week as the UK’s official bestselling title, this cookbook of recipes which each contain just five ingredients – “maximum flavour, with minimum fuss” – could be the erstwhile Naked Chef’s shot at his sixth Christmas No 1. Out now.

Mary Berry’s Mary’s Household Tips and TricksSubtitled Your Guide to Happiness in the Home and complete with an image of the beloved baker holding a basket of carefully folded blankets, this is Berry’s handbook for running a home, “gleaned from years of practical experience, along with all the hints that friends and family have imparted to me”. Out now.

John le Carré’s A Legacy of SpiesThe perfect gift for the thriller reader in your life, this sees the master writer return to his spy George Smiley. “Not since The Spy [Who Came in from the Cold] has Le Carré exercised his gift as a storyteller so powerfully and to such thrilling effect,” wrote John Banville in the Guardian. Out now.

Philip Pullman’s La Belle SauvageTwenty-two years after he introduced readers to the world of Lyra Belacqua in Northern Lights, the start of the His Dark Materials trilogy, Philip Pullman is returning to her world with the long-awaited first volume in a companion trilogy, The Book of Dust. This is the book which booksellers are buzzing about the most and will, undoubtedly, be huge. Out 19 October.

Nadiya Hussain’s Bake Me a Festive StoryA collection of linked festive stories and recipes by the Bake Off star, from the tale of the Snow Queen and a recipe for treacle ice cream, to Hussain’s own version of ’Twas the Night Before Christmas and a nut roast. Out now.

Harry Potter – A History of MagicA sumptuous journey through the British Library’s Harry Potter exhibition, showing artefacts from collections around the world, as well as manuscripts and sketches from the Potter archives, as it explores the subjects studied at Hogwarts, from alchemy to potions. Potterheads can also stock up on Jim Kay’s illustrated Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which is just out. Out 20 October.

Booksellers say that The Da Vinci Code author still has the magic touch. Robert Langdon, his code-cracking symbologist, is back, complete with an abundance of bad similes, and at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao to learn of a discovery which “will change the face of science forever”. Out now.

Origin by Dan Brown review – fun in its own galumphing way

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Dawn French’s Me. You. A DiaryFrench’s 2008 autobiography, Dear Fatty, sold more than 600,000 copies, according to the Bookseller. This, her first nonfiction book since, is a mix of French’s own diary entries and a journal for the user to add their own writing. “This book is a way for us to tell the story of a year together,” she writes. Out now.

Bruno Vincent’s Five Escape Brexit IslandIf Nick Clegg’s How to Stop Brexit isn’t a humorous enough take on leaving the EU, then perhaps the latest in the chart-topping Enid Blyton for Grown-Ups series will tickle your fancy. Set a year after the Brexit vote, it sees the five visiting their “evil genius cousin Rupert”, who “owns a chunk of the Jurassic Coast, part of which he has turned into an island and declared independence from Britain”. When a computer hack “plunges the Five into peril”, they have to escape back to mainland Europe. Out now.

David Walliams’s Bad DadThe Little Britain star’s 10th novel for children is out about a boy called Frank whose dad is in prison for driving the getaway car in a bank robbery. “Frank hatches a daring plan to break his father out of prison for the night so they can put the stolen money back. But will the evil crime boss Mr Big stop them?” Walliams’s previous titles have sold 20m copies. Out 2 November.